


petrol suns

by 7023bas



Category: AFK Arena (Video Game)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-03
Updated: 2019-09-03
Packaged: 2020-10-04 09:08:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 362
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20468546
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/7023bas/pseuds/7023bas
Summary: In the desert summer, Satrana loses herself in pretentious novels and old, old gods, then finds herself again in the flicker of campfires and Antandra’s golden eyes.





	petrol suns

We seek romanticism in all that is not there. 

Western deserts lie cruel against Malden’s frosted peaks, flush with the cold blue sea. The space in between swallows in shades of corrugated gold and beige sandcastles, those endless restless dunes yellow and hungry. Satrana comes out here most nights.

Miles away from the others at the temple, under the nervous sprawl of evening stars, she learns again to feel peaceful. The deep blue desert night is cold, borrowing with nimble fingers chips of ice from isolated mountains and Satrana becomes devastatingly alive in the goosebumped chill. Only when the frost cuts itself into her idle bones and she is numb, numb, numb does she light her own fire: red against gold, red in the blue, sparks lighting her ribs up from the inside out.

Antandra finds her nested there early the next morning in a corner afforded by two adjacent sanddusted rocks. The 4 am sun lights Satrana’s face a dusty pink, warm salmon light pooling in the dips and hollows of her sleeping face. A graybrown rattlesnake, drawn there in the night by the warmth emanating from Satrana’s scarlet frame, hisses at her from a pace away, scaly body curled into a small mountain.

“Run away with me,” Antandra murmurs, nudging Satrana awake. Satrana doesn’t reply at first, only peers sleepily at the warrior and smiles.

In her halfawake state, the firedancer thinks almost nostalgically of seagreen tomes bound in rough leather, shadowy margarine libraries and ice cold flames. The gods of the mauler tribes are old and aching, arthritic joints painted, cut, sewn; scorpions, leopards, tarantulas. They remain harsh in their age, brittle; deserters are not treated kindly. Satrana knows that more than anyone.

She looks up into Antandra’s warm lemon eyes, the desert trapped between her naked eyelids. “Okay,” Satrana says. “Okay.”

In the desert summer, Satrana loses herself in pretentious novels and old, old gods, then finds herself again in the flicker of campfires and Antandra’s golden eyes. Sometimes romanticism was there all along, hidden in spear shafts and rhomboid necklaces, two lonely girls in a lonelier desert. The sun rises; it goes on and on and on.

**Author's Note:**

> honestly just testing out how to post stuff; cute mauler grills are cute. title re: lucian mattison


End file.
